Stu Bykofsky: Anti-Israel BDS: Bigoted Double Standards

Posted: February 03, 2012

O NE WEEK after Holocaust Remembrance Day, the carnival of hate known as the National Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Conference arrives at the University of Pennsylvania today, its clown car stocked with lies, half-lies, white lies and bald-faced lies, playing to the ignorant.

It gets no sympathy from Penn, which rejects its theme. Penn believes in free speech, as does Israel, the target of the hate fest. Free speech, and most human rights embedded in Western societies, are absent in Arab states.

That is the truth, which is poison to BDS, which immorally equates Israel with white-dominated South Africa, and even Nazi Germany. That's what follows when you ally yourself with those who deny the Holocaust.

Rooted in propaganda, BDS parallels the delegitimization movement seeking to destroy Israel's status as a state. Not blood-soaked Iran, Syria, North Korea or Somalia. In the alternate universe of BDS (Bigoted Double Standards), Israel is the world's worst nation. BDS hypocritically heaps all blame for Palestinian misery on Israel, never whispering of Arab culpability.

With Israel's existence at stake, BDS holds it to a higher standard than it does any other nation. The tiny democracy lives in a sea of foaming hate, surrounded by Holocaust-denying neighbors pledging death to Jews. To this day, the Palestinian Authority praises murderers of Israeli children.

It is a spectacular lie, and arguably anti-Semitic, to accuse Israel of apartheid while ignoring nations actually practicing it. Try to open a church in Saudi Arabia and see what happens. There are mosques and churches all over Israel. An Arab justice sits on Israel's supreme court. An Arab woman has won the Miss Israel beauty contest. Is that apartheid?

No, this is apartheid: Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas demands a Jew-free Palestine. He wants what the rest of the Arab world already has - lands that are judenfrei, the Nazi term meaning "no Jews."

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs have been refugees for decades because their Arab neighbors lock them out and then use them as a club to bash Israel, where 20 percent of the citizens (with full rights) are Arab.

BDS complains that Palestinian Arabs are "occupied" and "humiliated" (a favorite Arab term of victimhood). Some even say that Israel "occupies" Gaza, even though Israel left in 2005 and got a stream of rockets in return. Gaza is "occupied" only by terrorist Hamas, sworn to Israel's destruction.

If "Palestine" is "occupied," how did that happen? The BDS crowd won't tell you, but I will.

Israel became an "occupier" by legally conquering land of Arab states that were massed to annihilate her in 1967. Before that, Jordan "occupied" the West Bank, which it seized in the 1948 war aimed at destroying Israel. Egypt "occupied" Gaza at the same time. No shed tears about that.

The usual historical sequence: Arabs threaten to obliterate Israel, they start a war, they lose the war, they demand the land back, and when Israel refuses to return land without a peace guarantee, they scream that Israel is an "occupier." It is the arsonist condemning the fire department.

Peace requires two partners. Palestinian Arabs don't offer peace and reject it when it is offered. After the Camp David peace talks collapsed, President Clinton blamed Yasser Arafat.

BDS propagandists pretend that Arabs are nothing but innocent victims and that Israel is solely to blame. Penn doesn't buy it and neither should you.